One hundred years before Freud's striking psychoanalytic
case-histories, the narrative psychological case-history emerged in
the second half of the eighteenth century in Germany as an
epistemic genre (Gianna Pomata) that cut across the disciplines of
medicine, philosophy, law, psychology, anthropology and literature.
It differed significantly from its predecessors in theology,
jurisprudence, and medicine. Rather than subsuming the individual
under an established classification, moral precept, category, or
type, the narrative psychological case-history endeavored to
articulate the individual in its very individuality, thereby
constructing a 'self' in its irreducible singularity. The
presentation and analysis of several significant psychological
case-histories, their theory and practice, as well as the
controversies surrounding their utility, validity, and function for
an envisioned 'science of the soul' constitutes the core of the
book. Close and 'distant' (F. Moretti) readings of key texts and
figures in the discussion regarding 'empirical psychology'
(psychologia empirica), experiential psychology
(Erfahrungsseelenkunde) and 'medical psychology' (medizinische
Psychologie) such as Christian Wolff, J.C. Kruger, J.C. Bolton,
Ernst Nicolai, J.A. Unzer, J.G. Sulzer, J.G. Herder, Friedrich
Schiller, Jacob Friedrich Abel, Marcus Herz, Karl Philipp Moritz,
J.C. Reil, Ernst Platner and Immanuel Kant provide the
disciplinary, historical-scientific context within which this genre
comes to the fore. As the first systematic argument concerning the
early history of this genre, my thesis is that the psychological
case-history evolved as part of a pastoral apparatus of care,
concern, guidance and direction for what it fashioned as the
'unique' individual, as the discursive medium in a process by which
the soul became a 'self'. The narrative psychological case-history
was in fact a meta-genre that transcended traditional boundaries of
history and fiction, medicine and philosophy, psychology and
anthropology, and sought, for the first time, to explicitly link
the experience, history, memory, fantasy, previous trauma or
suffering of a unique individual to illness, deviance, aberration
and crime. In a word, it demonstrated, as Freud later said of his
own case-histories in Studies on Hysteria, "the intimate relation
between the history of suffering and the symptoms of illness" ("die
innige Beziehung zwischen Leidensgeschichte und
Krankheitssymptome"). This genre not only had a profound and
far-reaching effect on the evolution of German and European
literature - one thinks of the rich traditions of the Novella and
the Fallgeschichte from Goethe, Buchner, R. L Stevenson, Edgar
Allen Poe and Chekhov to Kafka and beyond - but in shaping modern
literature, the clinical sciences, and even popular culture. The
book should therefore be of interest not merely to Germanists,
modern European cultural historians, historians of science, and
literary historians, but also those interested in the history of
medicine and psychology, the origins of psychoanalysis, the history
of anthropology, cultural studies, and, more generally, the history
of ideas.
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